Reflections on Kepler’s 2020

In early 2012, the Peninsula community learned that Kepler’s Bookstore was, like a lot of community bookstores, in trouble. Unwilling to see this beloved community treasure disappear, community members came together in an unprecedented effort to not just save Kepler’s, but to re-envision what the community bookstore of the future would look like. The Kepler’s 2020 Project brought together Kepler’s stakeholders including writers, readers, employees, publishers, donors, and community partners. All our stakeholders collaborated to figure out how Kepler’s could move forward as both a viable business and a vital resource for the free flow of ideas on the Peninsula. 

Together we decided to change Kepler’s purpose from selling books profitably to serving our community to deepen literacy and provide cultural enrichment. We changed what business Kepler’s is in, from being a retail bookstore with an events program, to being a community organization focused on building strong relationships, providing high-quality experiences, and developing new services with literary value. We changed how Kepler’s is organized, from the traditional retail model of hierarchical owners using a low-wage workforce to a highly-democratic organization with a committed and talented team.

A key idea from the Kepler’s 2020 Project was creating a hybrid model that divided Kepler’s into two parts: 1) The iconic Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, California, reborn as a social-purpose bookstore that works for the community’s benefit not for maximizing profits for its shareholders, and 2) A new nonprofit, the Kepler’s Literary Foundation, that would be the home of our events, workshops, and other community-focused programs. This new model would enable the bookstore to focus on being a great bookstore while the Foundation would be able to offer higher quality literary events and maximize the impact of its community outreach with support through donations and ticket purchases. 

Encouraged by the creative energy of our community, we implemented a fitting alternative leadership philosophy called Stewardship that requires a deep sense of responsibility to manage the organization for the benefit of all of our stakeholders.

A core assumption of the traditional retail model that we challenged was the role of Kepler’s staff. We knew that the new Kepler’s would have to pioneer new programs and services for the digital age. The staff would have to do more than sell books – they would have to take responsibility for not only turning around the performance of Kepler’s but also transforming it into a new and more sustainable model that would foresee future challenges and opportunities and respond to them proactively. They would have to collaborate with the community to build support for this new vision, develop plans, and help find the resources to invest in this strategic transformation. Realizing the crucial role of Kepler’s staff, we committed to proactively improve wages, empower staff, and invest in their training and development.

And now 2020 is almost here. The future that the Kepler’s 2020 Project was planning for has arrived. So this is a worthwhile time to pause and ask the question: did this ambitious plan work? 

And we think the answer is a resounding YES.

In a world where trends like online book sales and e-reading have seen the end of chains like Borders, B. Dalton, and Waldenbooks and continued hard times for many community bookstores, Kepler’s has bounced back from the edge and is bustling. 

The bookstore has been profitable for six consecutive years and continues to see strong book sales. We have managed to improve the compensation of Kepler’s staff at all levels by 75% since 2012 — a key concern in a high cost-of-living place like Bay Area. We also implemented a unique democratic profit-sharing program that’s used to distribute most of the bookstore’s profits to our staff. At the epicenter of the technology revolution, customers continue to adore Kepler’s. A recent online reviewer wrote “This bookstore is phenomenal, absolutely adore the books they have there... How the sections are organized! The authors they host! The helpful staff! Dog friendly to boot.”

Meanwhile our Foundation produces over 150 literary events each year to engage, enrich, and inspire our community. At the time of writing this post, we have just finished our best event season ever with record attendance and ticket revenues from packed events with authors including Naomi Klein, Ann Patchett, Haben Girma, Rick Riordan, Dave Barry, Richard Dawkins, Shannon Messenger, and Ijeoma Oluo. We are celebrating five years of partnering with the Ravenswood School District for developing young new readers in under-served schools in East Palo Alto and Belle Haven. We have won several grants for our work in schools and in order to develop new revenue streams we recently launched a program to produce literary events for major Silicon Valley corporations with SAP being our first client.

And this innovative new vision that you — our Kepler’s community — came up with has attracted attention around the country. It’s been featured in Stanford Social Innovation Review, Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post, and many other leading publications and has also won several prestigious awards. Kepler’s has been approached by scores of bookstores wanting to learn more about the new sustainable model we are pioneering, and inspired by our success many bookstores have started similar journeys, including setting up hybrid organizations and embracing nonprofit models.

So we are approaching 2020 with a real sense of gratitude. We can’t thank our community enough for all the support that we’ve been given as we have worked our way through this experiment together. Our success is the community’s success — it has been made possible by the beautiful, funny, and stirring words written and spoken by our authors; by the rapt faces of readers young and old listening to and reading them; by every customer who spends time leafing through books in our store; by the time and energy put in by our volunteers and our staff; and by the generous donors that have sustained our Foundation so far. None of this would have been possible without the efforts of every single one of you.

So What’s Next? 

As we move into the future, we plan to continue building on our successes. Major priorities for us include: 

Launching our Three Year Sustaining Fund. We are raising $750,000 to complete our Three Year Sustaining Fund, which will support the Kepler’s Literary Foundation’s community programs through the summer of 2022. $400,000 has already been raised, so we are looking for the final $350,000. 

Continuing wage and benefits improvements. Back in 2012 when we started focusing on the issue of wages it seemed like a stretch goal to raise the starting wage of new booksellers from $9 per hour to $15 per hour. We met and exceeded this stretch goal, but now $15 per hour looks inadequate. Similarly, our more-experienced staff deserve to earn higher compensation — at least in line with benchmarks of teachers, librarians, and other similar community service professionals in the bay area. On the compensation front, Kepler’s is ahead of most bookstores in our country, but we still have more work to do!

Assessing our impact. We consider Kepler’s to be at a relatively early stage of embracing the social impact model. We have a lot to learn from world-class nonprofits and social entrepreneurs, and one particular issue we would like to explore is how we can better assess the impact of our programs and services and whether we should further refine our social mission for this purpose. 

Amazon-proofing our business model to further enhance long-term sustainability. Amazon continues to increase its domination of the book market and is now also opening brick-and-mortar bookstores. At the same time, nearly 50% of American adults don’t read a single book after high school. We would like to double down on developing new readers, on ensuring free flow of ideas in our community, and helping people of all beliefs in having a shared reality. We believe this focus away from a transactional model will help us enhance Kepler’s long-term sustainability.

Building additional structures for ongoing community engagement.. We are thrilled to have a strong working board for the Kepler’s Literary Foundation that’s providing invaluable assistance in getting the nonprofit up and running. We see room for building additional structures and forums for ongoing engagement with those who have a stake in Kepler’s future.

Formulating a way to help other bookstores and communities. The word of Kepler’s success has spread wide and we continue to get many requests from bookstores and communities all across the US and occasionally even outside the US. It would be terrific to set up a way we can be more helpful to others.

To cut a long story short...

Eight years ago, I stumbled into Kepler’s when I was going through an introspective phase in my life and was asking myself the question posed by the writer and poet Mary Oliver—“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I was looking for a good cause to focus on, something I could believe in with all my heart and work on with all my energy.  It had to be something where I could make a difference, with help from others who cared and believed in the same cause. 

The cause our Kepler’s community committed to was reimagining our iconic but struggling bookstore as a community-owned and community-operated entity run primarily for the benefit of our community. Our cause was to create a vibrant literary hub for writers and readers. Our cause was to refocus the conversation to literacy, culture and public education fostered by a contagious culture of generosity and giving. Our cause was to build an A team with at least B wages in an industry notorious for D wages. In short, the Kepler’s community charted a bold new course. I thank you for this life-changing opportunity and allowing me to steward your beloved Kepler’s.

I invite you to get more involved. You can help by donating money, sharing your ideas, or offering your time. You can also help by continuing to patronize the bookstore and participating in our literary events.  Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or would like to further explore any of the above topics. I look forward to hearing from you. 

Praveen Madan

CEO of Kepler’s Books and Board Director of Kepler’s Literary Foundation, praveen (at) keplers2020 (dot) com